ultima9 performed a bit better in glide and i *think* it did look better. Haven't looked though in quite some time

I remember playing (or better: trying to play) Ultima 9 Ascension with a Geforce2 MX and it was really a slide show. With a Geforce 3 it was of course faster, but still somehow not really smooth. Than I tried a Voodoo5 and this was really an improvement in speed as well as in image quality.

Other examples that come to my mind:

Unreal - I'm still convinced that classic Unreal looks best with a voodoo card.

Turok - I remember a PC magazine testing all available cards and 3d modes for this game when it was published, and the clear winner was the Voodoo Graphics

Mechwarrior 2 - This guy has tested all versions and put his results on this site: http://www.geocities.com/k_lupinsky/

The screenshots are also good examples of the abilites early 3d accelerators had.

I think I remember Diablo 2 performing better using Glide than D3D but I'm not sure about graphics improvements.

That's what blizzard says regarding the game features:
http://www.blizzard.com/us/diablo2/

(you have to click on "3dfx" to view a summary)

Starsiege Tribes, well there's nice performance in that via Glide versus OpenGL, of course that's a given since it was Glide native before it had OGL support in a patch. My Geforce2 GTS ran it half the speed the Voodoo2 did.

DosFreak wrote:

I think I remember Diablo 2 performing better using Glide than D3D but I'm not sure about graphics improvements.

thats true, diablo2 was build from the ground up using the glide 3x API. directx6 was implemented very late in development and was also very limited.
Sven Labusch the developer of the diablo2 glide wrapper explained it very good:

hmm, ok, where shall i begin? Ah yeah, let's start, what this wrapper makes such different to the Direct3d-mode: 1. the Direct3d […]
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hmm, ok, where shall i begin? Ah yeah, let's start, what this wrapper makes such different to the Direct3d-mode:
1. the Direct3d-mode of Diablo2 creates far less textures than the Glide-mode, so the Direct3d-engine has to reload the textures more often.
2. the wrapper uses OpenGL, the Direct3d-mode DirectX6. DirectX6 does not support 8-bit-textures.
3. the texture-administration differs between DirectX,OpenGL and Glide:
The overhead for administration in DirectX is enormous, compared to OpenGL or Glide. So OpenGL and Glide have their advantages when using dynamic textures. And here's the key: Diablo2 has so much textures, that they won't fit on any graphiccard, so nearly all of the textures have to be loaded dynamically. And in this point Direct3D fails totally: the dynamic loading of textures is damn slow (in OpenGL its average).
As a work-around of this issue, the wrapper has to create far more physical textures , than are used in Glide. It is posssible, that the wrapper creates 64MB physical textures, when it it set to emulate only 16MB voodoo-texture-memory.

on real hardware, diablo2 benefits from 16mb voodoo cards. the textures look much sharper with voodoo2 in SLI mode as example.
i remember also having some graphical distortions with the direct 3d mode.

SysGOD wrote on 2008-05-07, 16:58:

thats true, diablo2 was build from the ground up using the glide 3x API. directx6 was implemented very late in development and w […]
Show full quote

DosFreak wrote:

I think I remember Diablo 2 performing better using Glide than D3D but I'm not sure about graphics improvements.

thats true, diablo2 was build from the ground up using the glide 3x API. directx6 was implemented very late in development and was also very limited.
Sven Labusch the developer of the diablo2 glide wrapper explained it very good:

hmm, ok, where shall i begin? Ah yeah, let's start, what this wrapper makes such different to the Direct3d-mode: 1. the Direct3d […]
Show full quote

hmm, ok, where shall i begin? Ah yeah, let's start, what this wrapper makes such different to the Direct3d-mode:
1. the Direct3d-mode of Diablo2 creates far less textures than the Glide-mode, so the Direct3d-engine has to reload the textures more often.
2. the wrapper uses OpenGL, the Direct3d-mode DirectX6. DirectX6 does not support 8-bit-textures.
3. the texture-administration differs between DirectX,OpenGL and Glide:
The overhead for administration in DirectX is enormous, compared to OpenGL or Glide. So OpenGL and Glide have their advantages when using dynamic textures. And here's the key: Diablo2 has so much textures, that they won't fit on any graphiccard, so nearly all of the textures have to be loaded dynamically. And in this point Direct3D fails totally: the dynamic loading of textures is damn slow (in OpenGL its average).
As a work-around of this issue, the wrapper has to create far more physical textures , than are used in Glide. It is posssible, that the wrapper creates 64MB physical textures, when it it set to emulate only 16MB voodoo-texture-memory.

on real hardware, diablo2 benefits from 16mb voodoo cards. the textures look much sharper with voodoo2 in SLI mode as example.
i remember also having some graphical distortions with the direct 3d mode.

Interesting stuff...I play diablo2 on mac and I am not satisfied with opengl or rave.

Unfortunately, outside of using a 3dfx card in OS 9, software rendering is the only mode that provides consistent frame rates in […]
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Unfortunately, outside of using a 3dfx card in OS 9, software rendering is the only mode that provides consistent frame rates in both OS 9 and OS X with both ATI and NVIDIA cards. I believe it wasn't the cards that were slow at loading and flushing textures, but it was more driver related. The game animation is all based on 25 fps, so anything above that is basically free time for your OS to process other things like sound and input, so you don't really need a consistent 60 fps. BTW, to check your frames per second, hit the return/enter key to open a chat window, type 'fps' without the '' and hit return/enter again. Your fps, ping, and rendering mode should appear at the top of the screen. If you're running a hardware accelerated mode and then switch to window mode you'll notice the game switches to software mode.

I've wasted many, many hours doing performance comparisons on various boards (V2, V3, V4, V5, Rage 128 Pro, Radeon AGP, Radeon PCI, Radeon 8500, Radeon 7500 Mobility, GeForce2MX). Since the engine is optimized for Glide performance, those ran the game perfectly in terms of framerates (occasional graphical glitches).

In OS 9, both RAVE and OpenGL can often times benchmark higher but when the screen gets really busy, frame rates can plummet and strange rendering effects can occur (missing head while standing still, missing legs while running, maybe a missing torso while swinging. Pretty funny actually) with RAVE getting the significant nod over OpenGL. One area in Diablo II that will kill OpenGL frame rates is at the Act V city gates. Ugh! Even with a 1.2 GHz processor, that part of the map can potentially drop the fps to around, oh, a frame ever couple of seconds. Another test I like to do is to go kill Shrek (Schenk), the unique mob at the too of the Bloody Foothills. If you run at him from the nearest WP, there's usually a spot near the base of the stairs where all the mobs get loaded. In RAVE and OpenGL there's typically a rather long pause (a few times it causes rendering issues until I quit). With software and Glide, the pause isn't nearly as long.

Software rendering keeps a rather low average, but it tends to stick around that average even in heavy traffic. OpenGL definitely has the worst performance out of the four rendering choices. When I play DII, I want to maintain a steady frame rate as often as possible so if I'm going to be playing for a while I boot into OS 9 and use my Voodoo5. If I just want a quickie in OS X, I use software rendering.

According to a Rob Barris, the Blizzard Mac engineer who's working on the Mac version of DII 1.10, they're going to be using similar techniques that Quartz extreme uses to improve texture loading and unloading, so you'll want a card that's either a Radeon or a GeForce card. I don't believe the performance boots will work with anything below those cards since they aren't Quartz Extreme compatible.